If I Die in a Combat Zone, depicts a soldier’s internal battle whether to enter the war or to escape, once the soldier is in the army, the book tells of his experience in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien believes the war in Vietnam is unethical and unjust through his experience upon being drafted, depictions of the battlefields, and how fellow soldiers acted.
Tim O’Brien felt as if the war was unethical and unjust upon being drafted into the army.
O’Brien attends basic training and finds out at the end, that he and a few others will become foot soldiers (pg. 56). This was what O’Brien had feared. He did not want to fight in the war nor go to
Vietnam, but his fears became his fate. O’brien feared Vietnam due to there being no straightforward reason for the
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Through the many depictions of the battlefield and the things that occurred, O’brien proves that the war was unethical.
The war was unethical due to how the soldiers treated the villagers they came across. On multiple accounts, Tim O’Brien wrote of how his fellow soldiers treated the VCs they came across. While he believed that not all of the Vietnamese people were the enemy, everyone else believed otherwise. O’Brien writes, in march he and his platoon made it to the old man’s well, this man allowed them to sleep in his house and bathed them (pg. 102). The old man was simply there to help the soldiers out and while some were thankful for a person like that, some could have cared less. The old man was hit in the face with a carton of milk by one of the fellow soldiers (pg. 103). O’Brien called the soldier that committed the act, stupid. He writes his feelings about his company without hesitation. The fact that O’Brien made the remark of the soldier being stupid proves that he thought war was unethical and unjust. He wrote that the things fellow soldiers did, did not have to be committed.
Another unethical and unjust task that the soldiers endured was the shooting of a